SaaS Content Audit: Why And How To Do It Right

Every content piece has a lifespan; statistics become outdated, facts evolve into myths, and even the best articles lose their appeal over time.

The best way to prevent this outcome and ensure your marketing content consistently delivers results is by revisiting them. And that’s where SaaS content audit comes in.

In this article, we will explain how a SaaS content audit can elevate your content game and detailed steps to conduct one.

What Is SaaS Content Audit?

SaaS content audit is a step-wise approach to evaluating each piece of content on your marketing channels—website, social media, product documentation, email templates—for performance, relevance, and accuracy.  

The process usually involves creating an inventory of all your marketing content, reviewing them to see if they align with your brand goals, updating outdated information, and removing content that no longer serves a purpose.

A SaaS content audit can be comprehensive—covering every piece of content regardless of the format, channel, or when it was published. 

Or sectional—covering only some parts or types of content on your website. For instance:

• Time: Audit every content published between 2020 and 2022 only.
• Format: Audit only blog posts and whitepapers published in the last five years.
• Channel: Audit only social media content.

Besides blog posts and whitepapers, other auditable SaaS content formats include:

• Webpages
• Guides
• Webinars
• Case studies/Success stories
• Infographics, videos, and other visuals
• Benchmark reports
• Slide decks
• Social media posts
• Product documentation

Benefits Of Doing A SaaS Content Audit

One of the top lead generation strategies for every SaaS business is content marketing—whether blogs, videos, infographics, or even report PDFs. However, it is quite easy to find yourself stuck with content filled with debunked myths and out-of-date statistics.

A successful content audit helps prevent these issues by ensuring your content stays fresh, eliminating inconsistencies, and addressing your audience’s evolving needs. Let’s break these down.

Maintain Content Freshness

Your content is fresh only if relevant and packs the same punch as a recently published one. The opposite of this is outdated content with facts that are already relics of the past. Take TheRankMachine as a case study.

According to a 2017 SEO article by TheRankMachine, “Domain Age is a ranking factor & Google cares about your indexed age.”

Fast-forward to 2019. Google’s John Mueller clarified that domain age does not really help anything. Leading SEO sites like SEJ also followed suit and concluded that domain age is not part of the 200 ranking signals Google uses.

In this case, a routine content audit allows the team to review articles like this, updating outdated information with fresh insights to keep the content current.

Eliminate Content Incoherence

Content incoherence is a common problem, especially for SaaS brands that started without a robust content team—a content strategist, a SaaS SEO, an experienced writer, an editor, and other crucial workflow members.

It’s usually a “Let’s hire a writer and populate our website first; we’ll sort the content marketing strategy out later.” However, that’s not a great idea. Content population brings up your website on search engines, but that’s all. There’s no structured content interlinking, no appropriate content clustering strategy, nothing.

This leads to content disorganization—a situation where your content lacks coherence, making it difficult for users to navigate or understand the site's purpose. 

An efficient SaaS content audit helps to prevent such an outcome by providing actionable insights to create a cohesive content structure and craft a successful content strategy.

When Should You Conduct A SaaS Content Audit?

First, you have to understand that the demand of every SaaS business is uniquely different. So, there’s no definite “when” to conduct a SaaS content audit. Instead, factors like the following are useful triggers to consider:

• Changes in your product or service offerings  
• Evolving  target audience or market  
• Shifts in performance metrics (e.g., declining engagement or conversions)  
• SEO trends and algorithm updates  
• Competitor movements and industry changes  
• Customer feedback and inquiries  
• The longevity of your current content 
• Company growth or scaling efforts  

So, let’s say you’re entirely migrating your offerings from one SaaS niche to another after over a decade. You need to review all your content to reflect this change.

A perfect example of this is Slack. Originally, Slack began as an internal communication tool within a gaming company called Tiny Speck, which was developing an online game named Glitch. 

However, when the Glitch failed commercially, the team pivoted, recognizing the potential of their communication tool. They rebranded everything—from content to placement—and launched Slack as a team collaboration and communication platform, revolutionizing workplace communication.

Another question is how often you should conduct a content audit. According to SEMrush’s state of marketing report, only about 33% of marketers conduct an audit twice a year, while 6% conduct theirs once every two to three years.

But you shouldn’t limit yourself to this. How often you should go in there and sniff out outdated content largely depends on the following:

• How much content is in your inventory already? Having a lot of content means it’s pretty easy to overlook the older content and focus only on the newer ones. That’s precisely what happened with TheRankMachine. So, the more content you have, the more audits you should conduct to ensure each piece stays fresh. 

• Your budget and resources are crucial. A SaaS content audit requires manpower and much money to manage your content team, procure audit tools, and sort other logistics. If you’re short on budget, an annual audit might be preferable.

Putting everything together, large businesses with a broad content inventory should conduct a twice-a-year audit every six months. Smaller companies or SaaS startups can do it once a year, depending on when you scale up or have much content to handle.

Lastly, you don’t necessarily have to wait for a designated time to conduct an audit. If there’s a problem with your performance metrics or you’re changing your offerings, as we previously discussed, then you know it’s time for an audit.

3 Components Of An Effective SaaS Content Audit

The main focus of every audit is to ensure your content meets your audience’s needs and aligns with your brand goals. But that’s only possible when you account for the following components:

1.The Strategy

Your content strategy guides how your brand creates, manages, and distributes content to meet business goals. Auditing helps reveal the intent and goals behind each piece. If the strategy is outdated or misaligned, update or replace it to match current objectives.

2.The Content

Review all content on your website, including page copies, blog posts, and CTAs. Ensure it conveys the intended message, engages your audience, and adheres to your strategy. Check for titles, formatting, font styles, and image usage consistency.

3.The SEO

Sometimes, your content is good but not visible. Use tools like ScreamingFrog and SEMrush to audit SEO performance. ScreamingFrog identifies indexing issues and broken links, while SEMrush evaluates content performance, revealing underperforming areas and opportunities for optimization. 

How To Perform A Successful SaaS Content Audit

Let’s go through a few steps to conduct a successful SaaS content audit below:

1.Gather Content Inventory

A content inventory is a comprehensive list or catalog of all the content assets on your website, including details such as content types, location, and metadata. The essence of creating one is to centralize all your content and enable easy access.

To create an inventory, you can use tools like Microsoft Excel and create labels for the following:

• Content type: Blog post, whitepaper, case studies, branded templates, etc.
• Title and Meta description
• Intent
• Word count
• Content location or URL
• Primary keyword and search volume
• Publishing date and Last modified
• Author (s) and Editor (s)
• Position on SERPs

Here’s an example of a comprehensive content inventory.

ScreamingFrog lets you export all your URLs at once. Run a crawl on your preferred page, export it as .xlsx, and import it to Excel on your spreadsheet. You can also extract details like search volume from SEMrush or Ahrefs.

To find the last modified date, check your content management system (CMS) blog page or use tools like Check Page Modified.

Alternatively, you can download pre-designed audit templates from sites like Clariantcreatives and modify them to align with your SaaS business.

2.Evaluate Content Performance And Quality

Let’s say your audit focus is mainly on blog posts. This is where you start digging into article quality, relevance, and overall performance.

Ask performance questions like:

• Does this content portray us as an industry leader?
• Is it generating qualified leads or driving sign-ups?
• How does the article impact customer retention and reduce churn?
• What is the conversion rate of visitors who engage with this content?
• Are users finding solutions to their pain points or problems through this content?
• How does this content perform in terms of user engagement and time spent on critical pages?

Besides performance questions, you should also look into each content’s quality. 

• Accuracy: Is the information factually correct and up-to-date?
• Clarity: Is the content clear, well-organized, and easy to understand?
• Engagement: Does the content encourage interaction, such as comments, shares, or further exploration?
• Value: Does the content provide actionable insights or solutions that benefit the reader?
• Readability: Is the content well-written with appropriate language and grammar?
• Originality: Is the content unique and not just a repurpose of existing material?
• Visual appeal: Are there relevant and high-quality visuals that enhance the content?
• Brand message: Is the content passing your brand message and representing your SaaS product in a good light?
• Comparison: How does it compare with competitors’ content?

From this assessment, you should separate those pieces that do not meet the bar and those that require no changes for now.

3.Assess SEO Component And Effectiveness

According to Google's content criteria, good content is enough to earn you visibility on SERPs. But that’s only if they are well-optimized. 

Follow this checklist to assess the SEO component of your content:

Keyword Optimization

• Are primary and secondary keywords used appropriately throughout the content?
• Is the keyword placement natural and contextually relevant?

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

• Are title tags and meta descriptions compelling and optimized with relevant keywords?
• Do they accurately reflect the content and encourage clicks?

Header Tags

• Are header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) used effectively to organize the content?
• Do they include relevant keywords and improve content readability?

Internal and External Links

• Are there relevant internal links that enhance navigation and user experience?
• Are there authoritative external links that provide additional value or context?

Content Quality and Relevance

• Is the content valuable and relevant to the target audience?
• Does it address user intent and provide comprehensive answers to their queries?

Page Load Speed

• Does the page load quickly on both desktop and mobile devices?
• Are there optimizations implemented to improve load times?

Mobile-friendliness

• Is the content optimized for mobile devices and responsive to different screen sizes?

User Engagement Metrics

• How do metrics like bounce rate, average time on page, and pages per session indicate user engagement?

Technical SEO

• Are there any crawlability, indexability, or site structure issues that could affect search engine rankings?
• Is the content free from duplicate content issues?

Backlinks

• Are there high-quality backlinks pointing to the content?
• How do the quantity and quality of backlinks affect its authority and search engine ranking?

You can use Google Analytics to check each piece's organic traffic generated, its ranking on SERPs, the top keywords and queries, and the referring domains.

4.Benchmark Against Competitors And Identify Content Gaps

Add the audit report—including strategy, content, and SEO—to your spreadsheet and benchmark it against the industry's top performers. This will help you identify gaps to fill and determine whether your content is underperforming.

• Are they getting more traffic for the same keyword in focus?
• Which source are they getting traffic from? Social media, organic search, paid ads, etc.
• How many referring domains or backlinks?
• What is their content's depth and quality?

Determine why their content ranks higher on search engines or retains more visitors. The reason could be as simple as an optimized blog title, meta description, or keyword placement within the article. And sometimes, your overall content quality might be the problem—abstract points, poor images, regurgitated facts, etc.

If you have content pieces that are doing better than your competitors, find out why as well. You can always capitalize on those strong points to improve your content quality and retain your position on SERPs.

5.Categorize Content And Develop an Action Plan

At this stage, you pretty much have all the data you need, but you need to categorize your content based on their performance or availability. Do this by adding a status label for content that is:

• Missing (Broken links, 404s)
• Top performing
• Underperforming
• Outdated
• Good to go

Highlight each label with different colors on your spreadsheet for distinction. For easy monitoring, you can also extract each content category into a separate spreadsheet.

Based on your analysis, create an action plan for each content category. This includes deleting, rewriting, or updating a piece with graphics. Sometimes, your action plan might be as specific as updating statistics to the most recent.

Follow up with your content team to implement these action plans within a specific timeline. Once that’s done, measure performance over a given time, say a month or two, by using Ahref or SEMrush.

Need Help? Leave It To Our Audit Team!

That's a wrap! You now understand what a SaaS content audit is, why it's essential for your business, and how to conduct one.

However, we know how complex the whole process can be, and that’s why we want to help you. At TripleDart, we’ve built a one-hit SaaS content audit strategy drawing on our decades of experience with various SaaS brands. 

Our team analyzes your website, SaaS product, and customers’ needs to design an actionable, result-oriented template that does the job. 

Ready to start? Secure a free consultation spot right now.